Born Malvina Milder of Jewish socialist immigrant parents in San Francisco, Malvina was refused her diploma by Lowell High School because her parents were opposed to US participation in World War I. She entered UC Berkeley anyway, and received her BA and MA in English. She married William Reynolds, a carpenter and organizer, in 1934 and had one child, Nancy, in 1935. She completed her dissertation and was awarded her Doctorate in 1939. It was the middle of the Depression, she was Jewish, socialist, and a woman. She could not find a job teaching at the college level. She became a social worker and a columnist for the People's World and, when World War II started, an assembly-line worker at a bomb factory. When her father died, she and her husband took over her parents' naval tailor shop in Long Beach, California. There in the late forties she met Earl Robinson, Pete Seeger and other folk singers and songwriters and began writing songs.

She returned to Berkeley, and to the University, where she took music theory
classes in the early fifties. She gained recognition as a songwriter when Harry
Belafonte sang her “Turn Around.” Her songs were recorded by
Joan Baez, Judy Collins, The
Seekers, Pete Seeger, and the Limeliters, among others. She wrote songs
for Women for Peace, the Nestle Boycott, the sit-ins in San Francisco on auto
row and at the Sheraton-Palace, the fight against putting a freeway through
Golden Gate Park and other causes. She toured Scandinavia, England and
Japan. A film biography, Love It Like a Fool, was made a few years before
she died in 1978.